Archive for the ‘Cambridge University Press’ Category

Talking of TEFL jargon (as I was two posts ago, the brief aside in between is apparently technically called an “insertion sequence”, fnaah fnaah), am I the only one to notice that since Scott Thornbury wrote “An A to Z of ELT” his other books have suddenly become full of more jargon than you can shake a dictionary at? Has he discovered a marketing method that is even better than the recent tendancy of textbooks to “just happen to mention” graded readers and dictionaries from the same publisher?

I’m presently enjoying the feast of jargon that is Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy, a book you can read a surprisingly large amount of by clicking on the top link on this Google search page.

“Sole Mates” from “The Grammar Activity Book”

Tie words that go together (such as collocations) to different students’ shoelaces. They then walk around putting their feet next to each other to try to match them up. If they make an incorrect pair, they have to take off their shoes and put them in the “lost soles” pile until (at that point I stopped reading…) Also useable (?) for dependant prepositions, verb patterns etc.

This was by far the nuttiest idea in the book, but certainly not the only one that made me go “What??” On the positive side, there are few ideas in the book that you would have seen anywhere else. On the negative side, there are at times very good reasons why no one had written those ideas down…

Continuing my occasional series (as occasional as reality coming into TEFL theory):

“…it is relatively rare for language teachers to negotiate overall learning goals with their classes at the beginning of courses in an open, direct manner. However… it is commonplace for language teachers to adjust their lesson goals in accordance with student needs in a subtle, ongoing way.”

The Experience of Language Teaching pg 164

Thank the Lord (and Lady Rose M Senior of TEFL) for this book, which is turning out to be more readable than the “popular” linguistics book “Lost for Words” by John Humphreys. 

The question that a whole book of TEFL reality checks has posed to me more than any other is, why does the DELTA take none of this reality of what good teachers do into account? Understood with the CELTA as it’s all about basics, but if most experienced teachers don’t stick to lesson plans and rely on instinct, how is one supposed to put that on a Diploma lesson plan?? And looking at it another way, what is the chance of them saying “Yes, your impeccably planned lesson to produce self motivated learners was fine in theory, but if you were a really experienced teacher you just would’ve been slipping that in as the best times came up”?

“She… reported that her self-esteem was raised when her [MA in TESOL] assignments were returned with comments that revealed, in her view, a degree of closed-mindedness on the part of the tutors who had marked them.”

From pg 72 of The Experience of Language Teaching, a book that is still highly recommended and I’m more than halfway through (in under a week!)

By complete coincidence, I’d been writing about boosting your teaching confidence just before starting the this book, and here is my effort:

15 ways to boost your teaching confidence

More articles on that coming up (as I have lots of experience of losing mine!), and in the meantime here is my other recent article::

 15 ways of starting a preschool English class

And that is it for this month, because I’ve been too busy eating kimchi to write and anyway I did loads earlier this month, which you can find here:

New TEFL articles October 2008

Heartbreak:

“One teacher reported that she had been the least nervous of all the people on her course - attributing this to the fact she already knew what it felt like to be deeply hurt…”

The Experience of Language Teaching page 40

I can see her passing on that tip now- “So, a couple of months before your TEFL course, make sure you pick a real bastard to go out with and then introduce him to your slapper sister…”

(more…)

I’m starting to pack to go to Korea, and the lack of CDs is a godsend. Books, however, are going to be a problem…

If you are in Japan, my loss could be your gain. If you are interested in any of the books below, I will send you a copy and even include one of the freebies listed at the bottom, in exchange for writing a review for TEFL.net reviews, as explained here. Please note, however, that I am paying postage out of my own pocket and will be rather miffed if good intentions does not turn into an actual review, so only volunteer this time if you are sure you can do it. When the publishers are paying postage like usual, however…

If you are in Korea, I might also be willing to add it to my box of books to take and send it from there, so you might be second choice but still, volunteer away!

If anyone is interested, please use the Request to Review for TEFL.net box on the Reviewer’s Guide page (a vital read for everyone who is interested), leave a message here, or email me using the Contact Me button on the main page of the blog.

Books available:

Oxford University Press
Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics

Activities Using Resources- Heather Westrup and Joanna Baker (Oxford Basics)
Vocabulary Activities- Mary Slattery (Oxford Basics for Children)
Listen and Do (Oxford Basics for Children)
The Oxford ESOL Handbook
Creating Songs and Chants- Carolyn Graham

Summertown Publishing
Success with BULATS

Marshall Cavendish Education
Achieve BULATS

Cambridge
The TKT Course

Delta Publishing
Challenging Children

The English Company
The English Course 3rd Edition (Gary Ireland, Kevin Murphy, Max Woollerton)

Already been reviewed, but will give away to people who volunteer to review titles above:

Oxford
Form Focused Instruction and Teacher Education

A History of English Language Teaching

More bits and pieces that I didn’t know, had never thought about or had doubts about from The Cambridge Grammar of English:

- The reason why you don’t double the p in “developing” is because the previous vowel isn’t stressed. Ditto for “delivered” and “opener”, but lots of words ending in -l in BrE and others such as handicapped and programmed don’t follow the rule
 
- Doubling consonants when adding -ed and -ing is part of a more general rule when “a suffix beginning with a vowel is added”, e.g. -ish, -ence and –er

- The “i before e except after c” rule only counts for the /i:/ pronunciation like “brief”, so most of the “exceptions” are because other pronunciations are spelt “ei”, e.g. neighbour, weigh, reign, leisure. Real exceptions include financier, species and examples of -cy changing to -cies, e.g. democracies.
 
- The final e making the preceding stressed vowel long, e.g. hat/hate, also works for -le, hence able, fable, bible etc.
 
- The plural of bus can be buses or busses. Ditto with biased/biassed, focusing/focussing, gases/gasses.

“While many teachers may attend to the questions ‘Do you like this language? Do you like this class?’, perhaps the more fundamental question for a student is ‘Do I like myself in this class?’”

(more…)

I’m continuing to learn from and ponder on the information in the Cambridge Grammar of English, and as before testing the matters I’ve been chewing on against your native speaker intuitions would be appreciated (sorry for the very unpleasant mental picture from that metaphor first thing on a Monday morning!)

The (modern?) name for & is “and” (not ampersand)
{ } = chain brackets (they’ve always been squiggly brackets to me!)
< > = diamond brackets
 
American English uses commas before and or but more frequently than British English
 
“Subordinate clauses can be separated by a comma from a preceding main clause, especially when the relation between them might be obscured because the clauses are long.” (pg 842), so “We can get there for around six, if there are no problems with the traffic on the motorway” is okay with or without the comma, despite being in the reverse position of the usual first conditional with a comma
 
Colons are used to indicate subtitles, and to mark a clause in which reasons are given: “We decided against it: it wasn’t lightweight enough”
 
Single quotation marks are becoming more widespread in direct speech
 
Colons may be used to introduce direct speech when it is particularly long
 
There are apostrophes (becoming optional) in “for goodness’ sake” and “for appearance’ sake”
 
In informal writing multiple dashes may be used:
 
“Just got back from Mallorca— we really loved it.”

If punctuation is your thing, or really isn’t you or your students’ thing but should be, here are some links:

Wikipedia on the ampersand

Info on Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss- a funny book on punctuation!

A whole list of punctuation books on Amazon

Punctuation worksheets on ESL Printables.com

And that is all I could find of interest. For classroom activities, one thing that works well, especially with FCE and CAE classes, is for students to take a text that is correct and add spelling and punctuation errors for another team to find.

Another good game is to put a text on the board including punctuation and get them to read out the whole text (including punctuation) over and over as you delete it one word or punctuation mark at a time until they can no longer remember it or the whole text has disappeared.

The game above works well with kids too. A more physical game for kids on the same point is to write up a sentence with one piece of punctuation missing in large letters on the board, and get them to take turns throwing a sticky ball (= sucker ball) at the place they think the punctuation mark should be.

My first surprise was introducing students to the piece of ELT jargon “speech acts”, something I only vaguely remembered from my reading for my DELTA myself, but more about that when I get round to reviewing The Cambridge Grammar of English…

Some of the above were some I had never thought about, some are ones I still doubt, and the rest are just vaguely interesting (something that is worth celebrating when you are reading your way through a grammar book!) Any comments after testing these against your “native speaker intuitions” (also known as “TEFL teacher prejudices”) gratefully received:

“You must” and “you’ll have to” are often used to give non-specific invitations
 
“And you must come down to Barr at some stage or another”
 
“You’ll have to come round for a coffee”
 
What if…? is used for How about…? in “standard British and Irish English”
 
“What if I set the table?”
 
“What if we had it here?”
 
How’s about…? for How about…? in informal contexts in standard British and Irish English

Informal lexis softens a speech act:
“pop in” instead of “visit”/ “wee” in “a wee favour”
 
“Please” is usually used at the end of a question, but children often put it first:
 
“Please can I have some more bread?”
 
“so” and “then” are common in declarative clauses functioning as questions
 
“So you had a good day at work then?”
 
“Didn’t it just!” is part of a general pattern of interrogative structures used as explanations, like “Was I exhausted!” and “Hasn’t she grown!”

“Would you mind if one of our representatives comes and gives you a free demonstration?” Would you mind + present

“You want to sound-proof your room with egg boxes”- “want to” for advice in “standard British and Irish English”